Generating User Documentation automatically

[Jerome Bleichenbacher]

Hey there

We want to introduce Jira in our company. Meanwhile we're re-thinking our development- and release-processes. Jira basically fits all our needs, however, we have an idea in mind that goes further than the standard-functionality.

For every release/patch we have to:

- create release-notes (what changes were made)

- how to install / configure the new release/patch

- what artefacts (ie. executable, script etc.) are being issued with the new release/patch

- how to use new functionality

- which bugs were fixed

We want to use Confluence to build all those documentation. Its no problem to create pages for all that stuff manually - BUT - we want the pages to be created automatically! If we create a new release in Jira, Confluence should:

- create a new release-notes-page (and every time a new Jira story/bug is added to this release a new sub-page should be created in Confluence)

- copy the "old" user-manual to a new version

- create a new installation-notes-page (and every time a new Jira story/bug is added to this release a new sub-page should be created in Confluence)

In general: the structure of the user-manual, the installation-notes and the release-notes should be generated automatically by Jira, for each release!

I know that there is a Jira-Plugin in Confluence, but it does nothing more than displaying a link to a story in Jira. So its useless for us.

And there are also other plugins like PageMe! (Jira) and Scroll Versions. I kinda need a combination of those. When you click "PageMe!" in a Jira-story it should create a page in Confluence in the corresponding (scroll-) version-page of this release. We could also develop our own plugin (or a plugin based on scroll-version), however, we dont want to develop Jira-plugins as we do have enough work beside...

Does anyone of you guys how to do this? Do you use this Jira-Plugin intensely? How do you create your user-manuals - automatically or manually - and which tools do you use? Maybe something else than Confluence?

I'm looking forward to a interesting discussion!

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

I would agree that all of this is possible, there is however no simple or short answer on how to do this.

If it were up to me to start at this, I would look into the APIs, JQL and CQL to start auto populating data. This would also require your whole process of creating issues/bugs to be well disiplined to always do it the same way to ensure the documentation auto populates.

Along with this, you need to ensure your ROI is in your favor of doing this. It will require upkeep to ensure its evolves with your company processes and disiplines.

I would strongly suggest you seek out a consultant and Atlassian Expert to further the discussion around this to ensure you have a scope of what you need to even start on this.

I do love this idea!

[Jerome Bleichenbacher]

Thanks for your reply!

Sure, we will seek a Jira-expert for getting Jira work anyway. But we're not sure if the cost outweighs the benefit. It seems to me like it would be to a lot of work which must be done - and a lot of customising und programming. And it also seems to me as if nobody has ever done this before...